There’s nothing worse than being unhappy: it drains your energy, makes you moody, and generally affects your home life. To avoid this situation, learn to be grateful for, and enjoy the things that surround you every day. Doing so will ensure that your life will be a happy one.

The above sentiment is beautiful, isn’t it. There is nothing worse than being unhappy, nothing worse than feeling like you hate everything and everyone and you can’t even define why sometimes; there is no feeling quite like stewing in anger and negativity, desperate to lift yourself out of it but staying firmly rooted in anger or anything else. When I read that for the first time, it really struck me, and I read it over and over until finally pasting it into a draft blog post, both because I wanted to remember those words on the days where they would come in handy, and because I could feel the slow bubble of inspiration forming, not because I knew what I was going to write about them quite yet, but because I knew someday that slow percolation of inspiration would eventually boil over into words I couldn’t wait to share.

So it will probably surprise you to know that the above sentiment is actually just my horoscope from a few weeks ago.

I read my horoscope every day. I don’t live and die by the words, and I don’t take them as fact, but I think they’re silly, and fun, and every once in a while mine will be scarily accurate. I think a common misconception about horoscopes is that they’re supposed to tell your future, like a daily fortune cookie, feeding into our constant desire to have someone else make the decisions, a disillusion with the random nature of reality. Things like horoscopes are meant to inspire your day, provide that little bit of motivation, yes I actually was feeling a little unhappy today and you know what, it is really taxing to feel that way. I’ve always been interested in astrology on a fun yet serious level, because shit really does get screwy when Mercury is in retrograde and I have found a sense of calm on the eve of a new moon, the signal that a new cycle in the random acts of life is about to begin. And for reasons that will become clear in November, I’ve been tracking the lunar phases lately to try and understand how the different phases play into the moving pieces of our lives.

This is the part where you tell me that astrology is bullshit and made-up, like a psychic hotline that promises to tell you when you’ll fine twue wuv for the simple price of $14.99 a minute. And I’d agree that anyone professing to see and know the future is probably out for quick cash. But step away from the hooey for a minute and there’s actually some logic to the argument that these planetary movements affect our lives. The moon controls the rise and fall of the tides; these timings can change when the sun rises and sets and in that, when we feel it’s time for bed. It pulls the earth along an axis that spins around in the same pattern, random and beautiful, just like the moving pieces of our lives. There’s a chaos in the order of the calm, steady nature of a cyclical change.

There’s not much to this post, no lesson learned, no life experience to compare to reading horoscopes and waiting for the next new moon, which conveniently happens right around the time that everything in my life might change completely or stay exactly the same. I suppose I could watch my horoscope to determine which way those winds may blow, live and die by the words by a skeptical psychic making money peddling moon signs to strangers. But no – instead I’ll keep watching for words like the ones above and save them for when I need a little burst of inspiration, keeping in mind that no matter what happens at the crux of the next full moon, to stay unhappy and to put your future in someone, or something, else’s hands, is the surest way to drive back to the unhappiness that started this whole stream of thought.

Update: I have no idea what’s going on with the font here………